Overseas mail systems before 1815 – Background for the development in speed
From the 17th century, merchant letters had arrived at British ports by private ships, while official correspondence was often carried by naval vessels. The arriving private ship letters were sent from the port of arrival to London, where they were marked up with three charges: the ship letter charge, the fee paid to the ship's master for each letter handed over, and the inland postage according to the number of miles the letter had been conveyed by road from the port of entry via London to the place of address.
The addressee could not receive his letter before having paid the total amount due.
At first, the only means of identifying incoming ship letters was from the endorsements in the manuscript on the letter, such as the name of the incoming ship or the name of her master. From the 1760s, the Post Office issued individually named ship letter handstamps to postmasters at ports in all parts of Britain. Similar kinds of arrival handstamps on ship letters were also introduced in France at about the same time.70 The purpose was to identify the letter as a ship letter and also name the specific port of entry, so that the inland postal charges on the mileage basis could be
70 In Britain, the first ports to use this type of handstamps were Liverpool 1757; London 1760; Cork 1761; Londonderry 1762; Greenock 1763; Dover 1765; and Deal, Plymouth, Poole and Portsmouth 1766. See Colin Tabeart, Robertson Revisited. A study of the Maritime Postal Markings of the British Isles based on the work of Alan W. Robertson (Cyprus, 1997), passim. - According to Tabeart, the first ship letter handstamp of Deal is from 1767, but a letter in the writer's collection, dated 26 June and arrived in London 30 July 1766, verifies an earlier date. (SRLC). - In France, the first ship letter arrival handstamps of this type were introduced in Marseille 1757, Brest and Rouen 1760, Bayonne and Port-Louis 1761, Bordeaux and Havre 1763, Ile de Rhé 1764 and La Rochelle 1764 and Nantes 1766. See Raymond Salles, La Poste Maritime Française. Tome 1, Les Entrées Maritimes et les Bateaux a Vapeurs (Cyprus, 1992), 7-9, Addendum, 1-4.
accurately assessed. These handstamps are often very useful for a historian who tries to reconstruct a ship letter's voyage.
Between 1770 and 1840, hundreds of different arrival handstamps succeeded each other with a wide distribution of ports, large and small. In the days of sail, ships put in at convenient ports for shelter from the weather, for water and stores, and also to report safe arrival and receive orders at the first opportunity. As the letters carried were required by law to be handed over at the first port of call, any port or haven was a potential landing place for ship letters carried by the early sailing ships.
The outward letters were sent similarly by ship passengers, by courier or, in most cases, by masters of ships sailing from British ports. The agents of shipowners also accepted letters in their offices, and handed them to the care of their captains. In London and other major ports, the owners of coffee houses collected outward letters in a bag, which was then forwarded to the ship's captain, who took them on board and delivered them in the port of destination to the local Post Office or coffee house, getting the nominal two pence charge per dispatched letter.
The unofficial system of private arrangement with ship masters continued to be the main channel through which letters to overseas destinations left from Britain throughout the 18th century. The Act of 1711 made it illegal to dispatch by private ships letters which could be sent by regular packets, but to places for which no Post Office packet service existed, ship masters were free to carry letters. Enforcement was difficult, and little respect was forthcoming from the letter-writing public.71
In 1799, a ship letter rate of four pence was imposed on single letters brought into Britain with a gratuity of two pence to the ship's master. Outwards, the rate for private ship letters was fixed at one half of the packet ship postage, while the gratuity to the ship's captain was increased from one penny to two pence. Merchants were encouraged to take their letters to the Post Office, which would undertake to find a suitable ship to carry them. Even though the Post Office repeated offers to the owners of coffee houses and taverns to become its salaried agents, the old practice continued as it had done for nearly two centuries. The coffee house proprietors were not interested, and the general public could not see any advantage in sending to the Post Office mail that was going out of Britain by private ships. Due to treasury needs after the war in 1814, the sea postage of incoming letters was raised from four to six pence, and a year later to eight pence, which was a very high rate, to be collected when the letter was delivered. The rate of outgoing private ship letters was decreased from one-half to one-third of what was charged by outgoing packets to make the government option more attractive, but to no avail.72
In addition to private merchant ships, British Post Office sailing packet services sailed from Falmouth at the south western coast of England to Halifax (Nova Scotia), Bermuda, the West Indies, Mexico and South America. The packet service started between Falmouth and Lisbon in 1689 and continued on that route until the Peninsula Steam Navigation Company, or the P&O, took over in 1837.
The Falmouth packets were speedier than the non-scheduled merchant ships, for which time was of little concern, while a fully loaded ship could bring the owners a satisfactory financial return. To carry only mail, as the government packets did, was primarily regarded as expensive misuse of shipping capacity. The armed mail packets
71 Alan W. Robertson, A History of the Ship Letters of the British Isles. An Encyclopaedia of Maritime Postal History (Bournemouth, 1955), A 1, A 3.
72 Frank Staff, The Transatlantic Mail (Massachusetts, 1956), 46, 54; Robinson (1964), 114-115.
carried just a few passengers, and fine freight like bullion and specie. The service was costly to maintain, and the Post Office packet charges to meet these costs were much greater than the nominal two pence charged by the master of a private ship. The public in general preferred private ships, thus avoiding the extra costs paid for Post Office packets according to the number of sheets and weight.73
The first transatlantic mail service from Falmouth to the West Indies was run monthly by Edward Dummer, a former Surveyor General of the Navy, in 1702-1711.
This was the first mail contract, by which the government sponsored private shipowners for transatlantic mail transmission. The service, even though originally very promising from the viewpoint of speed and regularity of mail transport, collapsed due to problems in financial management and expenses caused by losses of several packets and replacement of them.74 Another early attempt to start a regular transatlantic packet service was made by William Warren, with sailings between Bristol and New York in 1709. This service ceased in 1711 or 1712.75
From 1755, a monthly mail service was usually carried out between Falmouth and the West Indies, with several unavoidable delays and interruptions during times of war. This route later included a variety of colonies – a rather difficult service, as the ports of call were so widely spread in the Caribbean. By 1810, six local West Indian mail boats supplemented the sailing packets that crossed the Atlantic.
Communication from England was then bi-monthly. The packets were owned by private ship owners, usually the captains themselves, and they each had their separate contracts with the Post Office. The Postmaster organized the departures depending on the availability of vessels at port.76
The packet service from Falmouth to New York also started in 1755. The New York packets stopped regularly in Boston from 1773 onwards. A third leg for the service was established at Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1760s but remained occasional. After the American Revolution, the New York service was re-established in 1783. It was not conducted during the war years 1813 and 1814.77 From 1806, it was common practice to route the New York packets via Bermuda from November to February and via Halifax during the rest of the year to serve the British naval stations.
Finally, a packet service for South America was added in the Falmouth schedules in 1808 and the service for Mexico in 1824.78 Many of these routes were reorganized several times during their history.
The East India Company, or the EIC, had a long lasting monopoly in the East India trade until 1813 and on the China route until 1833, including a monopoly in the mail transmission between Britain and the Eastern trade ports.79
73 Robertson, A 3; See also Tony Pawlyn, The Falmouth Packets, 1689-1851 (Truran, 2003), 6. Despite its name, the latter study is mainly focused on the 18th century.
74 See L.E. Britnor, The History of the Sailing Packets to the West Indies. British West Indies Study Circle (1973), 3-17; Steele (1986), 168-188; Staff, 27-31; Robinson (1964), 35-39.
75 Robinson (1964), 38-39. See also John McCusker, "New York City and the Bristol Packet…", 177-189.
76 Robinson (1964), 93; Britnor, 39-43, 55-58.
77 Arnell (1980), 7-11, 17-18, 27; J.C. Arnell & M.H. Ludington, The Bermuda Packet Mails and the Halifax-Bermuda Mail Service 1806 to 1886 (Great Britain, 1989), 15-17.
78 Arnell & Ludington,v-vi; J.N.T. Howat, South American Packets. The British Packet Service to Brazil, the River Plate, the West Coast (via the Straits of Magellan) and the Falkland Islands. 1808-1880 (York, 1984), 1-4; Robinson (1964), 111.
79 Robertson, B 29, B 30; Staff, 58.
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